Lila froze. "Her who?""Your mother," he said simply. "She had been working with us much earlier than Thomas. He took her as a bride to bring him nearer to us. You didn't know?"The color was drained out of her face. "That's not true.""Oh, it's very true. It was her trust, Miss Ardmore. It all was her architecture. Your father was the front."Julian swiveled around to look at Lila. "He's lying."Elias smiled faintly. "Maybe. However, lies do not lie unless they are familiar.Lila shook her head and her voice increased. "No. My mother--she ran away, she could not take what he had become.And what do you suppose made him be it? Elias asked softly. "Love? Ambition? Or the woman who had taught him that power was the only thing that was greater than fear?Julian acted before he knew it and his hand was fisting in the collar of Elias. "You talk too much."The guards drew up their weapons in a moment, and the dots of red lasers traced all over the chest of Julian. The voice of Lila broke th

The storm rolled over the horizon like something ancient trying to find its way home. The road to the Ardmore coast was little more than a vein of mud and gravel, and the air was thick with the taste of salt. Julian’s headlights cut through the fog, each turn of the wheel pulling him closer to the place where it had all begun.The house by the cliffs came into view just before dawn silent, skeletal, and half-consumed by the sea wind. The roof sagged inward, windows shattered, ivy crawling up the blackened stone. Helena’s words echoed in his head with every step he took: There’s a file under my name.He stopped at the broken gate, the metal cold beneath his palm. For a moment, the rain stopped, and all he could hear was the ocean below, churning against the rocks. He remembered this sound from childhood before everything burned, before his name became a weapon.Julian pushed open the front door. The hinges screamed. Inside, the air was damp, thick with mold and memory. His boots le

Zurich shimmered beneath a sheet of winter rain, glass towers bending their reflections into the lake. The city was too clean, too polished, a place where power wore silence instead of gold. Julian stepped off the train with nothing but a worn leather bag and the ghost of Helena’s voice in his mind   One last fire.He moved like a man who’d done this before: unnoticed, uninvited, unafraid. The streets smelled of coffee and old money, the kind of wealth that never dirtied its hands, only its history.He checked into a small inn off Bahnhofstrasse under a new name   Daniel Kade. The woman at the counter smiled politely. “Business or pleasure, sir?”“Neither,” he said. “Just passing through.”His room overlooked the river. From the window, he could see the spire of the Bellgrave annex rising against the gray sky. The Foundation had moved its operations here aft

The hotel by Lake Zurich smelled of new rain and disinfectant. The sky was pale gray, the kind of color that didn’t belong to any season. Julian sat by the window, shirt unbuttoned, his shoulder wrapped in gauze where the glass had cut him. The city outside moved like nothing had happened trams clanging, people laughing, the world unaware that something powerful had just been erased.Lila stirred on the bed behind him, the faint rustle of sheets the only sound. She’d barely spoken since the explosion. For hours, they’d just sat there, breathing the same air, trying not to think about what came next.“Did anyone see us leave?” she asked quietly.Julian shook his head. “No one saw anything. The fire took care of it.”She sat up, her hair tumbling over her face. “And the files?”He glanced at the envelope on the table   half burned, sealed with tape. “What’s left of them.

The coast of the Adriatic was like an old unfulfilled endeavour, the water a dark indigo in the afternoon sun. Miravento was a village, fastened to the cliffs, its houses built of stone, and worn with time and salt, its streets too small to be overheard. Lila had selected it as it seemed the last place on the earth, silent, unassertive, miles away on the other side of the fires which had pursued her all the way around the globe.She was sitting on the terrace of a small cafe and a cup of untouched espresso was cooling on her. The newspaper report that she had a tablet shone dimly: "Anonymous Foundation Blows Whistle over International Corruption Cartel - Billions of dollars of illicit funds recovered. The bottom motto, "From ashes, truth," looked up at her like a ghost, which she could not shake.Since Geneva it was three months. Three months later Julian disappeared into the machine he claimed. There were no calls, no messages, no indications that there was still anything in the man